[yasr_overall_rating]
When a mother, Katherine, and daughter, Ellie, are at the most stressful of times, they can only imagine how the other’s problems could be more difficult. Thanks to the magic from their late father’s hourglass, their imagination becomes a reality when they switch bodies and see what it’s like to be the other person.
To date, there have been four “Freaky Friday” movies, including this one. Wanna know how many I have seen? Just this one. I have no desire to see the 1976 version with Jodie Foster or the 1995 version with Shelley Long and Gaby Hoffmann but the most famous of the four is the 2003 iteration with Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan. I usually send the Disney DVD review screeners I receive to one of my reviewers who has young children but I wasn’t able to send this one out in time so I sat down and watched it myself.
Katherine Blake (Heidi Blickenstaff) is the mother of her family, including rebellious teenage daughter Ellie (Cozi Zuehlsdorff) and her young son Fletcher (Jason Maybaum). It’s been years since the children’s father passed away and Katherine is about to marry her fiancé, Mike (Alex Désert). The day before her wedding, however, she and Ellie get into an argument and with the help of a magical hourglass, they each switch bodies: Ellie now inhabits Katherine’s body and vice versa.
In the moments after realizing what has just happened, Ellie accidentally drops the hourglass and it smashes into a million pieces. When both women comprehend that the hourglass is what transformed them, Ellie reminds her mother that it was given to her by her father before he passed away and that in fact, he also gave one to her mother as well but when Katherine informs her that she just sold it to an antique shop in town a few days before, they know what they must do in order to make things right again. They agree to pick up the hourglass but with Katherine preparing for the wedding and Ellie having to go to school, they recognize that for at least one full day, they are both going to have to stay in their temporary bodies and pretend to be the other, before they can pick up the hourglass.
The premise is simple, kids these days don’t realize just how much their parent(s) actually do for them and parents don’t often realize just how much kids go through, whether in school or just hanging out with friends because times have changed since they were teens. Being a Disney production, there is no language or even suggestive situations but we do see Ellie finally get the guy she’s been dreaming about, Katherine marries Mike, and young Fletcher finally makes a rabbit disappear (he’s a young Houdini in training), the quintessential happy ending that Disney adds on to all of their kids films. While the story does show the difficulties both sides have to deal with, a splashy song here and there makes everything right. And what’s wrong with that?
Available on Disney DVD September 25th
